Wayfare

It'll be interesting to see how asteroids are generated by KSP. In game they seem to be treated as parts which means they should be just a quick .cfg edit away from carrying fuel (which can then be extracted through the claw).

The problem is that these orbits will "degrade" quickly in terms of being close to spawning asteroids. As they are in higher or lower orbits than Kerbin, they will soon fall behind or ahead of Kerbin's angle to the Sun while asteroids will seemingly only spawn pretty close to Kerbin - within one Solar orbit of encounter as far as I've seen.

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That depends on the size of the asteroid and the number of parachute probes you're willing to clamp on to it before it hits atmo...

That may very well be the most efficient way to do it. It's basically the method of incremental gravity assists that folks have been using to send probes towards far-off destinations for a long time. Sure it takes patience, but it gets a lot done on a relatively small budget. Good thinking! I'm still not sold on what the most efficient rendezvous profile would be. Catching up in high-Kerbin orbit is definitely a good option, as it reduces the initial transfer delta-v for only a small loss in relative velocity at rendezvous. But you'll be pushing your craft out a long way in its heaviest, fully-fueled condition. Ideally you'd want to catch up to the asteroid just as it enters Kerbin's SOI, thereby minimizing the amount of extra velocity it picks up due to Kerbin's gravity (gotta love two-body physics). This seems to be the best of two worlds (HOR and HKOR). On a practical note, I don't know if the "closest approach" display will work if the bodies are in different spheres of influence. So if the asteroid is still orbiting the sun, but has a patched conics trajectory in Kerbin's SOI, could I get a closest approach indicator on a maneuver node trajectory while I'm orbiting Kerbin? Or, to make it even more complicated, while I'm orbiting Minmus and plotting a maneuver out of Minmus' SOI? There's a lot of SOIs to keep track of there and I don't know if KSP can handle all of that. Finally I don't think Minmus would make a very good waiting station. The odds of an asteroid encountering Kerbin while Minmus is in a good intercept position are pretty low, even less than the MOR profile which is also a long shot. Given that you'll have to burn out there anyway, you might as well park in low Kerbin orbit and take it from there. So yeah, I really like the idea of catching up with an asteroid and using a string of incremental gravity assists to achieve capture, but I don't think Minmus is the best place to hang out and wait for it.

Hmm. I wonder what the impact tolerance of an asteroid is. A sufficiently massive and/or fast impactor probe might just knock one into Kerbin orbit if you hit it at the right time without vaporizing it.

I like the way you think. I was thinking of chaining a bunch of asteroids behind each other and cruise them around the solar system shouting "Choo-choo!" at every encounter

Right, let's get our thinking caps on and figure out the best way to do this I've come up with a number of considerations and basic mission profiles. They are yours to think about, shoot full of holes, modify and/or add to as you see fit. What we're looking for is the most efficient way to get the job done in terms of delta-v - that cold equation which ultimately governs all of our endeavors in spaaaaaaace... Assumptions: - All asteroid trajectories are close to Kerbin's solar orbit and will cross Kerbin's SOI Soon. This is based on the videos I've seen so far. - We want to capture an asteroid into an orbit around the Mun. It could be Minmus or Kerbin itself, but let's go for the Mun as a baseline. - SLS parts and stronger joints allow us to put a lot of payload into space reliably. Still, let's leave the absurdly big stuff to the expert (yes, expert, singular - I'm looking at you Whackjob). Profiles: - Heliocentric Orbit Rendezvous (HOR). Launch a spacecraft as soon as possible and rendezvous with the target before it reaches Kerbin's SOI. This gives the lowest relative velocity at rendezvous and allows you to tune the target's Kerbin encounter at minimal delta-v expense. It does mean you need to push your craft beyond Kerbin escape velocity to get an intercept, greatly increasing the initial delta-v investment. - High Kerbin Orbit Rendezvous (HKOR). Launch a spacecraft to intercept the target as soon as possible after it enters Kerbin's SOI. The spacecraft will not need to be accelerated up to escape velocity and the relative velocity to the target will be fairly low still. It does make it more expensive to adjust the target's trajectory because you'll be deeper inside Kerbin's gravity well. - Low Kerbin Orbit Rendezvous (LKOR). Launch a spacecraft to intercept the target as close to its Kerbin periapsis as possible. This requires the least amount of intercept delta-v, but rendezvous and orbital adjustments will be much more expensive due to the high relative velocity and being so deep inside the gravity well. - Munar Orbit Rendezvous (MOR). Launch a spacecraft to intercept the target inside the Mun's SOI. This requires a target that is going to encounter the Mun naturally and you need to push your spacecraft out to there first. On the other hand, it is potentially the least complicated mission, requiring only one burn after rendezvous to complete. Delta-v cost of capture is lower that H/LKOR profiles as the target will not be as deep inside Kerbin's gravity well, and with any luck you can use the Mun's gravity well to help out. Other Considerations: - Number of spacecraft. It seems sensible to have two separate spacecraft: one dedicated probe to capture the target, and one crewed follow-up spacecraft to meet the captured target and perform SCIENCE! This way the capture craft won't need to haul around scientific equipment and crew, saving dry mass on the most delta-v intensive part of the mission. On the other hand, the additional cost/hassle of a second launch may not outweigh the savings made on a lighter capture craft. This becomes more pronounced the heavier the target is. On a particularly challenging rock, you could consider using even more craft: one for the initial capture into Kerbin orbit, another for adjusting the target's orbit to a Munar encounter, etc. - Target trajectory. Your mission profile may be dictated to some degree by the trajectory of the target. A target which will naturally encounter the Mun will lend itself to an MOR profile. A target on a highly inclined Kerbin encounter might be best captured with the HOR profile. A target coming in at a gentle inclination might best be captured using H/LOR, depending on its Kerbin periapsis. The target trajectory may in turn inform the choice of number of spacecraft. - Kerbin aerobraking. This would totally get you fired at NASA. It would also be totally awesome. Kerbin has that stinking atmosphere doing nothing but making our launches more expensive - why not put it to use? A Kerbin aerobrake/-capture could shave a lot off your delta-v budget. So ladies and gentlemen... How do you think we should capture a spacerock?

Mission courtesy of the amazing Better Than Starting Manned mod.

I'd suggest starting off with only some quality-of-life mods, like Enhanced Nav Ball and Kerbal Engineer, if even that. Leave the giant heaps of parts out of it for now - stock KSP will keep a man busy for quite a while without overwhelming him with seven kinds of RCS block and 5.149 meter xenon tanks. Plus, with stock parts he'll have an easier time picking up on tutorial videos which are fantastic for learning the game.

Flew a lander probe to Eve in the amazing Better Than Starting Manned mod. I didn't have the delta-v to circularize and the flimsy solar panel array would never survive an aerobrake, so the probe was designed to go in direct. Hit the atmosphere at over 4500m/s after ditching the transfer stage and solar panel array. Ablated 100% of the heat shield and peaked at around 10G, transmitting sweet sweet science all the way down. I called it mission success when the probe was under its chutes and floating down to the surface with two Sensor Array readings transmitted back to KSC. Then it actually landed intact and took surface readings too. Mighty chuffed!

Hogwash Here's an Imgur album of a Munshine V lifting over 55 tons to an 80km orbit at under 3900m/s detla-v. All stock except for Kerbal Engineer and Kerbal Alarm Clock. If that sets a record I demand to know

The answer is - it's bogus Giving your rocket a very slight (2-3 degrees) nudge soon after liftoff, then heading to about 10 degrees off vertical once you're about 4000 meters up will do wonders for your gravity turns. The specifics do depend on your TWR curve (asparagus designs keep a fairly even TWR while serial designs tend to build up TWR as their fuel drains, then drop off sharply as they stage) but I find going by surface velocity to be a good rule of thumb: - Halfway to 45 degrees at 250m/s - 45 degrees at 450-500m/s - halfway to horizontal at 750-800m/s - Horizontal at 1200-1400m/s This will give you a very efficient profile and result in a very flat trajectory. In fact on my most efficient launches, by the time I push my Ap to 80km my Pe is almost peeking above the surface of Kerbin, making circularization as easy as pie. The Munshine Lifters were built around this profile and it yields delta-v savings of over 10% compared to the standard 10km turn, 4500m/s profile.

Yeah, I need to get off my ass and release the 40-tonner already I think I'll go for the downgraded Munshine V Giggle pictured - its TWR-curve is fairly smooth and it doesn't get dwarfed by its payload much.

My first interplanetary craft was this beauty, video courtesy of HOCgaming: A bunch of the parts no longer look quite the same but it shouldn't be too hard to piece together. It's simple, rugged, has tons of fuel and the four nukes provide enough thrust to lift it off most solid bodies except Eve, Tylo and Kerbin. You can put large parachutes on top of the engine nacelles to help with landing on Duna. You should be able to make it there and back without the slanted drop tanks so you can leave those off. The trick is getting it to orbit with most of its fuel untouched. If you have trouble lifting it, consider picking up our Munshine lifters (we recycled the name) which include low-tech Career Mode versions. Hope this helps, even if just for ideas!

I can understand why you would think that, but as has been said, these are surface-to-LKO lifters. Please prepare to take a trip down Wayfare AE&KA Memory Lane A little over half a year ago, during the Great Apollo-Style Mun Rocket Craze, we released the original Munshine V. This was a fully-featured Apollo-style spacecraft including a command and service module and a Munar lander. It was quite a hit because it had the lowest parts count around and it was featured on YouTube by and the venerable . When 0.21 rolled around we released an updated version that was even lighter and even more of a crowd favorite, picking up close to 1500 downloads in its time. We were then also working on the Modular Mission System which required the development of both a lighter and a heavier lifter. We used the Munshine V's launcher as a template for those and soon after released them as the first Munshine Family lifter pack. We'd found a good niche - simple, serially-staged rockets with low parts counts and dependable operation. In September of 2013 we released the expanded Munshine lifter family. Giggleplex777 had joined the company and used the Munshine template to create a slew of launchers, both lighter and heavier than the originbal 22-75 ton range. But the core features remained the same: they were simple, light on parts, and reliable. Which brings us to today and this thread, where the Munshine lifter family consists of nine vehicles with a payload range between 5 and 165 tons (and a tenth in the works). Apollo-style spacecraft aren't as hot as they used to be, but we did release an updated version of our original craft as the Munraker. It still sits on top of a Munshine V lifter, as is appropriate. As you can see, over time the name "Munshine", though once marking out a Munar spacecraft, has been adopted by this family of lifters and its name-giver has actually had its name changed to avoid further confusion. If you want to go even further back, have a look at October of 2012 and the very first Wayfare AE&KA rocket, the Munshine XI-B. Which was also featured on . But there is no real evolutionary link between that old dog of a rocket and the lifters before you today

You whippersnappers have obviously never known the time before there was KSP at all. Back in those days when we wanted to go to the Moon, we had to build an actual rocket and fly there! No map mode, no maneuver nodes, no time acceleration. All we got was some grainy TV footage and a few rocks, and we liked it!

That looks pretty awesome Reminds me of some of the "serious gaming" sessions I've been part of. In lieu of KSP's contract/money/prestige system, you may want to set some house rules and assign different objectives to each class of player. For example, the flight directors want the safest mission profile, the controllers want the biggest bang for buck (though I think you have those roles mixed up), the engineers want to build the fanciest rockets, the astronauts want the most thrill and spectacle, the logistics manager wants the simplest implementation, the trajectory planner wants the smallest delta-v budget and the media rep wants the most impressive pictures. You don't need a points system (though you may want a budget) but you need to impress on each party that while the mission is important to all, their individual objectives are important to them. Thing is, without restrictions there's pretty much nothing you can't do in KSP right now unless it's physically impossible. Set some limits, force some compromise. I'd love to see the heated discussions as each group tries to push its agenda on a high-profile mission, and I'd love to see what they settle on in the end. Good luck!

I had the same issue with a probe today. If you go into the FAR flight data menu when this happens you'll probably see some absurdly high number at "reference area". Basically, FAR erroneously assumes your craft has an enormous surface area. Combined with its (relatively) low mass, it descends like a sheet of paper rather than like a spacecraft on ballistic re-entry Updating to FAR 12.5.2 fixed it.

After many, many tries, landing on the Mun for the first time gave me a physical rush that I rarely experience in games. Trembling hands and shallow breathing type stuff. The last time a game did that for me was my first kill in EVE Online. The one before that was escaping the Arcada in Space Quest I. KSP walks proudly among giants in my opinion.

You're welcome! Glad you enjoy this product, it's been quite a labor of love putting it together Bloody hell I actually prototyped some 2x2 and 3x3 core modules but figured the MOMS ships were getting big enough already. I may need to revisit those...

I'm totally stealing that

Oh Maybe if you edit the version numbers in the .craft files?

These designs should be fully backwards compatible to 0.22. If you find any problems, try the 0.21 versions instead. The latter pack doesn't include the 5, 125 and 165-ton variants but the rest of the gang is all there.